The topic I want to investigate is the (quantitative) difference between music by musicians with perfect pitch vs relative pitch. In a lot of musical scenes, perfect pitch (or absolute pitch) is adored like it is some kind of godsend. On one hand, perfect pitch only means you can identify pitches quickly, which would not necessarily make you a better musician. On the other hand, using it as a tool to learn music theory faster and easily identifying pitches when playing in some kind of ensemble could really make someone a better (subjectively, of course) musician. Listening to music is not the same as playing music and identifying music is not the same either.
It’s not hard to identify that my natural comparison groups would consist of artists (PP artists vs RP artists). However, I’m not quite sure yet as to how I want to sample these artists. Just choosing some PP artists and some RP artists would easily fall to biases, so I should definitely think a lot about how I want to sample the artists. Keeping differences that are due to genre out of the comparison will definitely be one of the biggest challenges for researching this corpus. I think the most interesting artist to research in this corpus is Jacob Collier, since he seems to have one of the most brilliant and specific absolute pitches known to humankind, and he has made some astoundingly complex music, in which absolute pitch definitely seems to have had an impact in the way he has challenged conventional music theory rules. Examples of crazy Jacob Collier songs would be Everlasting Motion (feat. Hamid El Kasri), With The Love In My Heart, etc. I will use his music for analyses of specific songs.
I haven’t been able to do much yet, but at least here is a chord-o-gram of a song by Charlie Puth who has PP.
In the pitch graph, you can see very clear boxes, especially around the 200-300 mark. These indicate novelty. The 200-300 mark is the bridge, which is why it is the clearest box (since bridges are, generally, melodically very different from the verse and chorus). You can also see some diagonal lines around the 75-200 mark, which indicate repetition. In the timbre graph however, you do not see these diagonal lines, apart from the one through the middle that indicates that we’re graphing the same song against itself. This means that there seems to be no or very little repetition within timbre. However, since the whole timbre matrix is almost completely blue, this indicates that there is very little timbral change.
A comparison of the playlists “This is Mozart” and “This is Haydn”. Mozart had absolute pitch, while Haydn did not. As you might be able to see, Haydn’s pieces have a wider range of valence for both his minor and major pieces than Mozart, especially in the high valence (positive mood) range. The compositions of both artists have a low level of energy, which is consistent with their style, but interpretations of the pieces by the orchestras performing the pieces could also have an effect. Mozart’s pieces also seem to have a wider distribution of energy in his pieces in major.